Photons and Electrons

This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This blog is about technology, as well as some of my personal interests. I am the CEO/CTO of Virtual Photons Electrons. I was the CTO for MEMEX for three years, the President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute from May 2010 to January 2014 and prior to that I spent 23 years at Sun Microsystems.

The article starts out:

"Manufacturers of many stripes can save money just by making better
use of data emanating from the factory floor. But for those in aerospace
and defense—Airbus Helicopters is a prime example—the potential payoffs
are legion.

The combination of strict product-tracking requirements and high
labor and maintenance costs are driving adoption of data management
products
among aerospace and defense companies, industry insiders said."

Aerospace and defense are seeing tremendous payoffs from knowing what is happening on the shop floor. Dave McPhail nails it below:

“Every hour that I can save in taking it from a nonproductive hour to
a productive hour is of substantially more benefit to aerospace and
defense manufacturing than it is to, say, automotive or maybe food and
beverage packaging,” said David McPhail, CEO of Ontario-based Memex
Inc., which makes software that monitors machine efficiency. The
aerospace industry involves expensive equipment, personnel, and product
maintenance, which are all incentives to exploit shop-floor data, he
noted."

Long time friend and MTConnect thought leader, RonPieper of TechSolve discusses MTConnect and a great IIoT example that TechSolve deployed for an engine aircraft maker:

"Another enticement is the fact that some aerospace companies are
starting to require the MTConnect standard in their equipment purchase
requirements, said Ron Pieper, product manager at TechSolve Inc., a
Cincinnati-based manufacturing consultancy.

The ROI for aerospace companies adopting data-management tools is
evident, Pieper and others said. He cited an example of an aircraft
engine maker that wanted to monitor the consumption of a specific gas
during the manufacturing process. After TechSolve installed sensors on
the manufacturers’ gas lines, he said, they discovered a gas leak that
had amounted to an annual loss of roughly $100,000."

"Despite all of the incentives for greater use of shop-floor data
products, aerospace and defense companies are not immune to the cultural
hurdles practitioners say are impeding digitization in the
manufacturing sector writ large. Some analysts estimate that the
percentage of manufacturers that have implemented data-management
software on the factory floor is still in or near the single digits."

My experience tells me that the number is in the VERY low single digits.

All of the individuals interviewed for this article nail the reason for slow adoption -- it is cultural and financial. Below are the points made on culture and MOST importantly, Crawl, Walk and then Run in your implementations.

"Making the jump to data-driven manufacturing requires a culture
within the company that sees data as the glue that can hold the factory
together, McPhail said. The goal is “one objective view of exactly
what’s going on in the factory,” he added.

One way of getting to that shared vision of data among management is to only bite off what you can chew.

“We actually caution shops, when I go talk to them about doing monitoring and data collection, about not trying to get too much data too soon, because the big hurdle is cultural; it’s not technical,” Pieper said. McPhail echoed that reasoning, urging manufacturers to identify
business objectives up front that data-driven manufacturing can help
realize.Of course, the flood of data available once factory machines are digitized can be overwhelming.Jody Romanowski, CEO of software vendor Cimco Americas, said
customers sometimes have grand ambitions for data collection—to want
operators to scan, for example, dozens of downtime codes when machines
aren’t running. Such high-volume scanning is often not feasible, so her
firm works with customers to break down the amount of data sought into
manageable categories.

“We’re always trying to find ways to make that happen more
efficiently,” she said of crunching data captured on the factory floor.
“That’s a huge consideration and still a struggle sometimes.”To avoid flooding customers with data, Wintriss only dispatches data
relevant to the customer’s mission, Finnerty said. “If we send a data
word from one of our controllers up to the database, every bit in that
word means something."

"Cisco recently conducted a survey to understand the Internet of
Things (IoT) scenario, i.e., its hits and misses in an increasingly
IoT-crazy technology world. The results were eye-openers to the reasons
why over three-fourths of IoT projects were ending up as failures. A
mere 26% of the undertaken projects were taken to successful completion,
indicating that there is a great deal to be learnt and implemented in
our IoT journeys. "

That number is really anything but surprising to me IF you factor out the manufacturing industry. The reason I make this statement is that in manufacturing, IIoT or Industrial Internet of Things, is really about using sensors to augment what is already being monitored. In other words, the framework is already in place and MTConnect is the protocol of choice for discrete manufacturing and IIoT is really the addition of sensors.

Since IIoT is augmented to MTConnect, the ratio for success, IMHO, is in the 95% and up range.

The survey was quite extensive as stated below:

"The survey collected the responses of about 1,845 IT bodies and the
results were expressed in Cisco’s IoT World Forum in London, where Cisco
chief executive Chuck Robbins talked about the problems that plague IoT
forays by corporations. "

The author brings out basic blocking and tackling projects of the failure - lack of commitment. I don't care what project is, if you do not have a champion, forget folks! Below they bring out the Holy Grail issue that I highlight.

"The first problem that he cited lay in the lack
of buy-in in the IoT concept, leading to a lack of commitment to take
projects to completion. In fact, a whopping 60% of the IoT projects are
seen to stall at the proof of concept stage itself. The result is that
enterprises are not willing to invest in the necessary IoT
infrastructure, but merely want faster results by investing in a
readymade integrated architecture that works “as is.” This is why most
enterprises end up looking to buy IoT as a service, rather than taking
the hard way and building a strong IoT architectural foundation. "

"Ready made integrated architecture that works "as is" " is what EVERYONE wants, but is really, really hard to do and why graduates in Computer Science quickly get to 6 figures of salary. If it was easy, any damn fool could do it. It ain't easy. This is why I have always believed that MTConnect will be the tail that wags the IIoT dog for manufacturing.

In this article, Mark brings out:

"ITAMCO, a manufacturer of
precision-machined components and high-precision gears in Plymouth,
Indiana, has a history of integrating its machinery and equipment with
networked sensors and software. Many of these connections are powered by
software applications for mobile devices—apps developed in-house by its
own technology team. In 2012, the company implemented an
MTConnect-enabled machine monitoring system. Soon after, key pieces of
machinery were connected to the company's enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system. Now ITAMCO has developed a communication system for its
forklifts, citing this connection as a good example of how the
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will benefit manufacturing. In this
case, it has made forklifts, the workhorses of the plant floor, more
valuable than ever at ITAMCO."

Joel uses MTConnect extensively at ITAMCO.

What is absolutely worth watching is the 13 minute video at the end of the article where Joel discusses what ITAMCO does, including building the gears for a pump that was designed for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that can pump an entire olympic size swimming pool in 6 seconds! That's right, 6 seconds.

AMT has always been the global thought leaders in manufacturing and this leadership position is accelerating. It's as if there is a petri dish of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the world of manufacturing.

An example of this merge of technologies and ideas is in the very important area of data sciences and artificial intelligence (AI) branches such as machine learning. To help make this critical transformation, AMT hired a very talented individual that is part of the MTInsight team. MTInsight is a leading platform for online business intelligence which delivers knowledge that leads to informed decision-making and increased productivity. The individual's name who is leading edge data sciences effort is Nina and she is a Data Scientist. Nina has spent the majority of her career within the quantitative realm.

Nina has started a very interesting blog titled, Nina's Data Metrology World in Manufacturing, which is a must read not only for those who have an interest in manufacturing and data, but anyone who wants to understand the right way to think about data.

I was asked to update a set of MTConnect Hands-On Training Lab slides I did for a visit to Taiwan back in 2012. Part of the update was making the MTConnect Simulator more interesting than just the single part being created that has been out at agent.mtconnect.org for a long time. Don't get me wrong, it is a nice and simple simulator, with the binaries, data files and instruction out at github.com/MTConnect, but it was time for an update for those who want to dig into the details of MTConnect a little more and provide a little more sizzle as well.

"The resurrection of AI in recent years can be attributed to significant developments in machine learning systems, especially in one of its sub-field called – deep learning. Machine learningimparts “computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed”. Deep learning isa class of machine learning algorithms that use deep artificial neural networks with multiple hidden layers.While evolution in machine learning
drives the current AI boom, the hype has caused certain misconceptions
around the capabilities of these systems. Some of these misconceptions
have risen to the level of myths."

I won't spoil the punch line by listing all three here, but the author does make important distinctions between today's reinforcement learning and how a baby learns to walk.

"If we compare the learning process of
a machine with that of a child, it becomes evident that machine
learning is still in its infancy. For example, a baby doesn’t need to
watch millions of other humans before it learns how to walk. She sets
her own goal of walking, observes other humans around, intuitively
creates her own learning strategy and refines that through trial and
error until she succeeds. Without any outside intervention or guidance, a
baby displays curiosity to learn and successfully walks, talks and
understands others. Machines on the other hand requires guidance and
support at each step of learning.

Moreover, a child easily combines
inputs received through multiple sense organs to make the process of
learning holistic and efficient. In one article, Dave Gershgorn indicates that “AI
research has typically treated the ability to recognize images,
identify noises, and understand text as three different problems, and
built algorithms suited to each individual task.”
Researchers from MIT and Google have published papers explaining the
first steps on how a machine can be guided to synthesize and integrate
inputs from multiple channels (sound, sight and text) to understand the
world better."

I am excited about machine learning, but I am cautiously excited as I know at the end of the day it is still 1s and 0s running on hardware someplace and I remember the multiple AI winters going back to the AI Ambassadors in the 1980s at Sun Microsystems.

My father, John K. Edstrom, has done a lot of work in capturing this information back when he was in college at St. Olaf and I will work with him to scan in what he has done to augment this blog post.

Above is the Spring Garden Lutheran Church in rural Cannon Falls, MN where a number of the Edstroms are buried. It was a classic beautiful Minnesota day in the country with corn fields surrounding this church on a country road.

"This is a group blog providing analysis on politics, philosophy,
economics, and technology. Postlibertarian means firstly that we believe
generally in free markets, individual liberty, and small government,
but we are not purists. We like classical liberalism because it’s got
pretty good empirical results over the years. It also means we focus on
areas outside of politics only tangentially related to libertarian
ideas, including philosophy, cryptography, prediction markets,
urbanization, rationality, game theory, and the singularity."

I like the description above because my buddy is a libertarian, but these folks seem to emphasize the pragmatic side as well.

The post brings up both my view and my long time friend's views. First, my overall point on the logistics of building the Interstate Highway System:

"The Interstate Highway System could not have been built without vast
seizures of private property under eminent domain (theft) laws. I know
of one couple in their mid-60’s who were so distraught about being
evicted from the home they had lived in for over 40 years (for the
Capital Beltway) that they both died within months and, undoubtedly,
there were thousands more. But, of course, the ‘public good’ or the
‘national interest’ or interests of the ‘masses’ is more important than
the rights of a few obnoxious individuals who want to keep their homes,
farms or businesses."

The point that follows in another part of the blog, "It seems hard to imagine
that a similar system would have sprung up from private parties since it
spans so much land and jurisdiction and requires so many resources," is my main point. The sentence that follows above is my buddy's point: "yet
my belief in the power of markets leads me to suspect that something
unpredictable and wonderful would have somehow arisen in its stead."

Below is the paragraph in its entirety.

"But fortunately or unfortunately, all we can do is speculate about what
the United States would look like today if the federal government had
never created the Interstate Highway System. It seems hard to imagine
that a similar system would have sprung up from private parties since it
spans so much land and jurisdiction and requires so many resources, yet
my belief in the power of markets leads me to suspect that something
unpredictable and wonderful would have somehow arisen in its stead.At
the same time, libertarians can always point out the imperfections of
the status quo and theorize how things would be better off without the
government. My theory can always beat your reality."

I should state I am not a fan of eminent domain for private companies as I do believe history is littered with corruption and stories of the little guy getting screwed in the name of "progress". However, for the Eisenhower Highway System, I do believe in eminent domain.

The bottom line is that it is HARD or I would say impossible, to imagine how the 47,856 miles of the Eisenhower Interstate System would have come about in any cohesive or logical fashion without eminent domain. Again, as the blog post states, "it seems hard to imagine
that a similar system would have sprung up from private parties since it
spans so much land and jurisdiction and requires so many resources."

My good friend is always quick to point out the screw ups of government as why he is a libertarianand why we do not need government, which of course, if your "go to argument" is "government makes mistakes", then that is very easy reflex point to fall back on.

The biggest issue I have, as I always state :-), is that my buddy's hypothetical country, let's call it "TriJavaLibertarianLandia" and his theory can always beat my examples of reality. Unfortunately, for all of us carbon based units, we live here in reality on planet earth.

The good news is that we are both in our late 50's, so we will keep up our discussion of this topic for a long, long time to come since we first started this when we were in our 20s, kept up in our 30s, talked about it even more in our 40s, and now well into our 50s. What is important to remember, is that we can have these discussions
and still be best of friends. Which is not easy to say these days when
folks differ on ideas.

If we end up at the same old folks home for "Geeks and Gearheads", I am sure the others will be saying, "would you two IDIOTS *please* talk about something else!" To which one of us will respond, "why should we stop now?" :-)

Above is my mother on the left and my Aunt Mary on the right. It was a GREAT birthday party!

My sister and I went bass fishing with my cousin Kyle on his mother of all bass boats. My sister caught a very nice large mouth that our Uncle Luverne enjoyed that night for dinner.

Below is my sister catching the nice bass.

Below is my mother and sister in Cannon Falls at the Fair Grounds area on a beautiful day being towed on a trailer with a couch.

The first day we surprised my aunt on the Bier Stube in Hastings. My father is out above after the big surprise lunch.

Below is me giving a tour of my Uncle Tat Thompson's Mercury that he absolutely loved.

Below Julie and I sat on one of my cousin Troy's Harley at Tom and Cindy's house for a Thompson Reunion.

Below are the Harley's leaving Tom's.

Tom gave us a tour of his garage above and a tour of Zumbrota in his 1939 Chevy below.

Above my father met with his five cousins in Hastings during the trip as well.

Above is Mary with her grandchildren at her 88th birthday party.

Below is at Mary and Marvin's place in Hastings.

Above is my godfather, Uncle Luverne, standing is my Uncle Merle and my father is seated next to his brother.

Below is the Red Diamond Saloon in Randolph, MN where the two uncles above and my other uncle Gene (now deceased) took me in 1977 and got me the drunkest I have ever been on my 18th birthday. Now some of it was my fault :-), I walked in and it was .25 for a beer, so I said, "A quarter a beer, it's my 18th birthday, two beers for everyone in here on me!" Well, needless to say that made me pretty popular for return beers in Randolph :-) The population is 447 today and likely below 350 in 1977. My three uncles thought, quite correctly, that it was hilarious that they got the oldest grandson of Kenny and Dorothy Edstrom and the son of John K. Edstrom absolutely stupid drunk on his 18th birthday. They busted my chops forever on that day :-)

Below on the flight back, I put my parents in first class as they automatically upgraded me and Julie. My mother had picked up a stomach bug and was not feeling that great as you can see in the photo.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

What I like about AWS webinars is that they tend to be very content rich and very well presented. This is in that same category.

It is interesting that these IoT discussions still miss the most important bit -- giving a common context aka dictionary for the huge variety of devices that are out there. The assumption is every developer knows what all of necessary specifics of what each device is capable of providing. The problem is that translation is forced to be handled by the developer and that never scales. This is where MTConnect could play a huge role.

I am on the Thursday the 7th at 9:45 - 10:45 AM on the Data Driven Manufacturing Panel

Below is from the Top Shops homepage describing the conference.

"Top Shops participants will notice an emphasis not just on the products
and the processes that are driving manufacturing. But, more importantly,
visitors will learn from and interact with their peers.

Top
Shops will feature other manufacturing professionals who have shared
their tips, tools and technologies in an effort to not just benchmark
their own business, but to provide other manufacturing enterprises
information that can help them improve their operation. Topics covered
will include:

Advanced Machining Technology

Shopfloor Practices

Business Strategy

Workforce Development

Operational Benchmarking

Additive Manufacturing

Robots & Automation

Data-Driven Manufacturing"

Below is Doug Woods, President of AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology, discussing Top Shops:

I was told by the Top Shops Conference organizers that those interested in the conference can use the code, EDSTROM, to receive $150 off their registration.

My fondest memories were the on-air conversations between him and George Michael the sports broadcaster for Channel 4 and his stories. In this video they both lose it when they are watching a model continue to fall on the runway in Paris. One of my favorites was when President George H.W. Bush called him up to go fishing on the Potomac. We watched him grow as we grew over the years as well. In 2013 he came out against the name Redskins and I was with him on the change of heart as well. He also liked Harleys and even though he was very famous in the DC area, he still came across as just a nice guy who happened to be the local anchor.

The reason I received the link is because of this opening sentence that referenced Sun employee #2 Vinod Khosla:

"Does professional and life experience – also known as ‘wisdom’! – have value when it comes to big ideas and innovations?

You might think not, from reading this quote by billionaire
Vinod Khosla, who was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems. He’s
been quoted as saying that “people under 35 are the people who make
change happen … people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas”."

It is interesting that the article actually quantifies what older workers can and do bring:

"A study conducted by Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Rock Center
for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and director of research
at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke,
found that twice as many founders were older than 50 as were younger
than 25, and there were twice as many over 60 as under 20.

After studying 549 successful technology ventures, Wadhwa
recaps: “The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth
industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40.

“Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under
25. A clear majority – 75 percent – have more than six years of
industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create
their start-up.”

I suggest paying attention to a recent move by Google.

They’ve initiated a pilot program to support “a neglected
group of innovators in the UK”. That’s right, the over-50s entrepreneurs
and idea people.

The Founders over 50 accelerator provides a free platform
for “inspiration, training and skill-sharing, to bring the support
needed to grow a new business,” Sarah Drinkwater, Google’s Head of
Campus, told Techworld.""

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

This was an exciting time for Sun Microsystems when SPARC came out in 1987. I remember being asked to attend the first field meeting for SPARC. We were called SPARC Ambassadors. I met a lot of very interesting and talented individuals at this first meeting. One of my memories was they gave us this piece of paper that had a brass round head fastener (that you last saw in elementary school) to show off the SPARC Register windows of Ins, Outs, Locals and Globals by rotating the upper piece of paper to show the registers. I was fairly new to Sun at that point, but I still raised my hand and said, "I think there are a few individuals who will be interested in register windows, but I know a lot of customers who we deal with will just want to know SPARC is 10 MIPS compared to a 4 MIPS 25MHz 68020 and they will need to recompile their software if they have Motorola binaries." As SPARC proved, it was not about clock rate, but rather about how much
work was done in a give cycle. SPARC was a great architecture.

Using an unproven new architecture, this processor put Sun Microsystems on the map

states:

"The Berkeley group, led by David Patterson, called their approach RISC, for reduced-instruction-set computing.

As an academic study, RISC sounded great. But was it marketable? Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle)
bet on it. In 1984, a small team of Sun engineers set out to develop a
32-bit RISC processor called SPARC (for Scalable Processor
Architecture). The idea was to use the chips in Sun’s new line of
workstations. One day, Scott McNealy,
then Sun’s CEO, showed up at the SPARC development lab. “He said that
SPARC would take Sun from a $500-million-a-year company to a
billion-dollar-a-year company,” recalls Patterson, a consultant to the
SPARC project."

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

In this 40 minute webinar, I provide my personal thoughts on the technical and business issues to be aware of when implementing MTConnect for machine tools, devices or sensors.

The impetus for this webinar is the tremendous amount of interest I have seen globally for companies and individuals who are considering deploying MTConnect enabled machine tools, devices and sensors.

When I think of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) I think of MTConnect. The reason for this is that monitoring and data analysis begets more requests for additional information and this can be accomplished by the addition of MTConnect enabled devices and sensors in the plant.

Please use the comment section of this blog for any questions or suggestions that you may have.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

One of the bucket list bike rides I have been wanting to do was from Ocean City, MD to north of Lewes, Delaware (where I run out of land and have to turn around). I did this last week for the first time and it was 64.8 miles round trip. It was a GREAT day for this ride.

Above is the bridge over the Oregon Inlet in Delaware.

Above is the view north of Lewes, DE.

Above is the Cape May-Lewes Ferry entry point.

Above and below is from Gordon's Pond north of Rehoboth, DE.

Above is the huge wind mill from University of Delaware and below is an old Farmall like my grandfather had that is used for pulling boats in a boat yard I pulled into north of Lewes.

In January of this year we received an email from Bobbi and Richard Franklin mentioning that we should try to get the entire crew together for a reunion at Ocean City, Maryland this summer. We all looked at dates, spoke to our kids, and settled on the week of June 24th. The Franklin and Edstrom families have been vacationing together since the 1990s and have always had a great time. This was the absolute BEST week we have had! Below are photos from this past week and in years past as well.

Above is a photo of all us with Bobbi's parents sitting in the front row on the left next to my parents.

Below is the weather forecast and it turned it was correct and we had GREAT weather in Ocean City, Maryland this past week.

Above is the water bottle that I had made at Walls Litho (former boss Sue Walls Print Shop) which Tim and I designed and gave out to everyone who attended. I thought it would be a nice way to remember a GREAT week.

Above, Janet took a photo of Tim, John and Julie in front of the first place we hit at lunch which is The Dough Roller and Dayton's Chicken with Thrasher Fries at Ocean City's famed board walk. Michael showed up for lunch and the Franklins got in later in the day.

A must dessert is Dumser's Dairyland for some ice cream!

Above is me and my three sons enjoying a drink before we all had dinner at the bar at Hooked the first night.

Above is all of us at Harborside Bar and Grill in West Ocean City. Michael's girlfriend Colleen was able to make it for a few days after taking the red-eye in from California.

Above is Tim, Michael and John before they left on their 55mph Jetskis at Top Gun on Dorchester Street next to Marina Deck.

Above is my sister with her three nephews.

Above is Grandpa with his three grandsons and below is my mother with Colleen.

Below is Taylor, Julie, Tim and me enjoying a drink at The Big Chill at Oregon Inlet in Delaware on our way to have dinner at Jake's in Rehoboth.

Below are five photos of the Edstrom and Franklin kids in the early to mid 2000s. From left to right on the back row is Michael and John Edstrom with Casey and Max Franklin. In the front row is Tim Edstrom and Taylor Franklin. Unfortunately Casey and Max Franklin could not make it for the 2017 reunion.

The Jordan's know how much I love Old Bay, that they bought me the hat! Above I am drinking Deadrise beer (Old Bay Beer) with my hat on :-)

Above is from 2006.

Above is from 2007.

Above is from July 2007.

Above is from 2003.

Above is from 2002.

Above is from 2006 where are all of us including my sister holding onto Tim with my parents - John and Ruth - between Tim and me. This was down near the lower part of OC near Marina Deck Restaurant.

Above is Taylor and Tim in 2003.

Above is Julie and Bobbi in 2015.

Above is Casey and his girlfriend Kelsey in 2015.

Above is from 2015 with our multiple umbrella setup so folks can get out of the sun.

Above is Bobbi, Richard, Julie and me in 2013.

Above is from 2010 with Richard and the whole crew with Janet next to John.

Above is a photo from a few years ago of Bobbi, me, Richard and Julie.

Below are two videos of Richard and me competing on who could ride the waves the furthest - Richard won one and I won one :-)

About Dave Edstrom

This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This is the same name of the blog I had for Sun Microsystems for many years. I am the CEO/CTO for Virtual Photons Electrons, LLC. More info is available at http://VirtualPhotonsElectrons.com I was the CTO for MEMEX for almost three years. More information on MEMEX is at http://MemexOEE.com